October 15, 2010

Dear Families,

In the next 2 weeks we will be having lots of special events at school. If your child is allergic to any of the following, please email me asap: milk, canned pumpkin, instant vanilla pudding mix, cinnamon, ground ginger, graham crackers, raisins, cookies (without nuts), juice.

Here are some highlights for the week:

• Language Arts: Our journal entry this week was to write about pumpkins. We practiced capital letters, spaces, periods, and sounding out words. In literacy centers, our letter of the week was R. You can see our computer center illustrations for the letter R in our website, under “Classwork.” For listening center, if your child had trouble sounding out the words to write their favorite part, please practice this skill with them at home. I say it is like a rubber band and we’re stretching out the word, saying it very slowly to hear all the letters. Keep practicing!

• Social Studies: Congratulations to Paul, who was chosen as our sixth Star of the Week! You can read about him in the “Classwork” section of our website, and click under “Star of the Week.” On Monday, we learned about Christopher Columbus since it was Columbus Day. We made a project that taught us that the world is shaped like a sphere, and that Columbus sailed in a ship from Spain in 1492. Ask your child to tell you about him!

• Math: We finished our second Unit on identifying patterns and shapes. We reviewed the skills from this chapter and took our Unit test today! We started glancing at the next chapter on numbers from 1-5 and comparing sets using the words: more, fewer, and same.

• Computer Lab: This week we started our October Kidpix illustration about a poem we have been learning called, “Pumpkin.” We practiced using the oval and rectangular tools to make our pumpkins, and we added faces on our pumpkins to make them Jack O’Lanterns. We will finish the background next week.

• Science: In the next two weeks, we are learning the life cycle of pumpkins. We read several non-fiction books about how pumpkins grow and change. We are comparing the life cycle of pumpkins to the life cycle of apples that we had learned in September. This week we learned some vocabulary words such as seeds, roots, sprout, buds, or vine, and we are making our own books to learn about the pumpkin life cycle. Have your child teach you about how pumpkins grow!

• Library: We will not be visiting the library or having library journal homework for the rest of October because this week and last week was the book fair, and then we don’t have school on the last Monday of October. Instead, I will just pass out the homework packets on Monday in your child’s daily folder. I encourage you to keep finding books and reading daily to your child! On Monday, we did get to visit the library and make a wish list of books that we wanted. Thank you for those of you who bought books for our classroom from the book fair! I appreciate your generosity!

• Friday Fun Centers: This week we started learning about scarecrows and we read many books about scarecrows. We took a close-up picture of our faces and made a scary expression. We used these photos to make our scarecrows, using square wallpaper pieces and other decorations. Also, we made a spider hat and learned a short poem about spiders!

• Fall Portraits: Today we took individual pictures which are used for school files. Thank you for turning in the photo envelopes today if you were interested in purchasing them. If your child was absent today, there will be a make-up picture day next month.

Make sure to visit our website! I have been updating it every week with information about the Star of the Week and now computer center drawings that we do for each letter of the week. In addition, about every 2 weeks I upload the computer lab drawings we make, as well as photos of our classroom decorations. Take a look at this month’s artwork in our classroom! I also took a few pictures to show you what our literacy centers look like. There are no close-up pictures of the students, but you can see them in action during listening center, computer center, and vocabulary center.

Have a wonderful weekend!